Windows 7 activation through a Smoothwall proxy

[paul_1989]

Nothing new pops up on the web filter log as I try to activate it, so I'm not sure it would tell you much really >.<

[nile_c]

Well, it tells us that the traffic might not even be hitting your SmoothWall.

Do you fancy running a tcpdump for extra fun?

[paul_1989]

I've attached the results when I try to activate. I'm 10.10.0.184

[nile_c]

Thanks paul_1989. Comparing your dump with my own from the other day I've found the problem. The activation process accesses 'go.microsoft.com' first and then gets bounced with a 302 to activation.sls.microsoft.com

So, we also need to include go.microsoft.com to the auth exclusions and make sure it is allowed. Hopefully that is the last one :-)

[paul_1989]

I have go.microsoft.com in the auth exclusions but what do you mean by make sure it's allowed?

[nile_c]

Once you setup the auth. exclusion it will treat any access to those domains as "Unuathenticated IPs". Because there is no way to tell who is behind the request once we skip authentication.

You will generally have the "Unauthenticated IPs" group blocked from the internet, or using a quite restricted policy. The next step is to create an 'Allow' rule so that unauthenticated clients can get to the excluded domains.

Based on this thread, the relevant domains for Win7 activation are:
activation.sls.microsoft.com
go.microsoft.com

(In addition to any others already configured for windows/office updates etc.)

[paul_1989]

Thank you! I'm no longer "a victim of software counterfeiting" haha.
Had those 2 in the do not require authentication box all along, but with unauthenticated users disallowed access.

[MartinT]

Thank you for this. I have been puzzling over how to get Windows Activation and Updates to work properly through our Smoothwall/Smoothguardian setup and this technique works perfectly.

[DrCheese]

Ooh, ooh... are you sure activation is using a proxy? does the "proxycfg" command still exist in win7? Sometimes various windows components don't use the proxy as set in IE.

You can use this nowadays..
open elevated CMD
netsh
winhttp
import proxy source=ie (will copy ie settings)

to remove, it's just
reset proxy (Instead of import proxy)